Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
within it the beginnings of another paradigm can be discerned, that
of information, which would come to take a similarly dominant
role in the twentieth century. The first law of thermodynamics was
codified by the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, then
26
years old, in a famous lecture given at the Berlin Physical Society
in
. Helmholtz constructed a full mathematical formulation of
the concept, which could be applied to mechanics, heat, electricity,
magnetism, physical chemistry and astronomy. In essence Helmholtz
stated that energy can be neither created or destroyed, and that there
was a fixed amount of energy in the universe. This formulation was
crucial not just in the development of thermodynamics, but in the
move from a general conception of the universe in mechanistic
terms inherited from Newton, to one in which energy is the domi-
nant aspect. Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (later Lord
Kelvin of Largs) independently developed the second law of thermo-
dynamics. Clausius's version of the second law states that energy may
not lose quantity but it does tend to lose quality. Clausius realized
that, without outside aid, heat could only move from a hot reservoir
to a cold one and not vice versa. Clausius coined the term 'entropy',
from the Greek for transformation, to describe what he saw as the
universal tendency towards equilibrium, or in other words towards
a situation in which energy is distributed equally in a system. In a
lecture of
1847
the German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, inventor
of statistical mechanics, compared entropy to 'missing informa-
tion'. In this passing statement he prefigured the relation between
entropy and information that would comprise a vital aspect of
how information came to be understood. In the next century this
insight would become the basis of Information Theory and be of
crucial importance to the development of telecommunications,
computers, genetics, and Cybernetics.
12
Capitalism can operate as a self-regulating system because of the
emergence of the 'money commodity'. The latter serves as a form
against which all other commodities can be valued and which
1894
